*Christopher Award
*Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry
* Myra Cohn Livingston Poetry Award
* ALA Best Book for Young Adults
The Gist
This book is a collection of poems that make up a story about a girl who has schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disease that makes you hear voices, see hallucinations, smells odors that other people don’t smell, and even feel things like fingers grabbing your arm even though nobody is around. It is a very serious condition and the main character in this book has a sister who has it. Cookie’s sister had always been normal. Then one night, completely out of nowhere, her sister goes crazy. She’s locked in a mental hospital and isn’t allowed to leave until the disease is cured. Cookie has to deal with her friends shunning her when they realize that her sister is a schizophrenic, her parents fighting twenty-four-seven, and her sister confiding all of her crazy thoughts to her. Cookie has to concentrate on keeping her own sanity in check, so she doesn’t end up rooming with her sister in the psych ward.
What We Think
Reviewed by Dream Catcher
Number of Pages: 149
I originally read this book at a friends house. I was visiting for two weeks and saw it when she had left the room for a few minutes. I read the description and was instantly sucked into the story. When my friend came back from the bathroom, she found me immersed in the book, not about to put it down. She told me I could borrow it until I finished, so I did. I ended up giving it back to her the next day. That’s how long it took for me to finish this. An hour or two. That was one thing I wasn’t thrilled about; it should have been longer. The poems in this story are free-verse, so it seems like Cookie is talking to you. It really got me into the story. I felt like I was one of Cookie’s friends, and she was explaining what was happening to her sister while I listened to her story. It’s a true story, which is also something I found cool about the book. The author obviously changed her name from Sonya to Cookie for this story, but hardly any of the other main characters even had names. Her sister was simply called Sister. Her mother called Mother. Her father called Father. The fact that her family had no names gave the story a creepier feel, like it was also part horror, and not just a non-fiction. Not only is this an interesting book to read, but you can pass it off as a school book too. I had to read a book for a psychology project, and this fit the description of what I had to read perfectly. I didn’t have to suffer through a horribly dull biography. I read something that really made me think about how hard it was to live with schizophrenia, and how hard it is to live with a loved one who has schizophrenia. So…in summary, this book was good, not the best book I’ve ever read…but still worth reading.
Real Teen Rating~ B: Read it but there's no rush.
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